Day 73
stride
The irony is this: you spend many years trying to be a certain kind of person, the person you believe is you, the person that you hope is good, right, relevant, etc., only to discover that trying to be is not being. You realize that your emotional messiness, your physical imperfections, your lack of skill in certain areas, do not need to be charming in order for you to like yourself—only you do have to acknowledge them and make your peace with them. Just at the moment that you are beginning to do that (if it happens in middle-life, as it does for many of us) you see that the messiness and imperfections of your earlier life are rapidly deteriorating into even greater imperfections, and you struggle to keep up with “accepting” yourself as you are, even as you begin to experience the aging process in earnest.
In fact, hitting your stride, so to speak, is more about pacing your self-acceptance and the awareness of your mortality and irrelevance, with the process of aging, and less about becoming adept at whatever you have been working on for twenty-years. I wonder if the rapid growth of our minds, demanded by the rapid growth of technology is not just requiring us to become smarter or more skilled at a quicker rate, but is creating existential crisis because we are trying to keep up rather than learning to recognize and live with our limitations at a younger age. If, in the early years of our adulthood, we could learn to see ourselves as we are, reconcile ourselves to death without fear or anxiety, and let go of the very real expectation that we will keep up…perhaps we would hit our stride earlier; becoming healthier in mind, body and spirit, thereby becoming more effective.
Of course, this requires that we learn to take in more than just the needs of the world around us, the demands of our education or gifts, and the sense of urgency; all of which are very real and profound. We also need to take in the beauty that still is, even if it is seeping through the widening cracks of climate change. We need to find the common threads that run through all humanity, even through those who are made foreign to us by their convictions, or actions that we find abhorrent. We need to ground ourselves in the joy that is embodied in our relationship with family, friends and lovers.
And though I am in the middle of my life, I say “we” because my heart is held together in part by my children and their generation. If I am finally finding my own stride, working at a healthy pace, then I must act and live to a great extent, for them, that they are not left alone, without hope, in the mess I created when I did not know better.
